Another Revenue Stream?

There is more to corn oil that just the conversion of the corn oil into biodiesel. For one thing, it saves the industry energy and money by making the DDGs easier to dry.  Also, by taking the oil out, it concentrates the protein and makes the feed better and cheaper to maintain or feed out most animals. But it might also provide another “revenue stream” that we seldom talk about. A reader sent in this idea.
  
The extraction of oil from DDGs improves the digestibility of cattle feed. With higher protein inclusion, more nutrient uptake - less methane will exit . . . up the stack.  Methane is very important since is at least 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

The Basics
Each bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds and contains about 2# of fat. 12 Billion gallons per year of ethanol produced uses about 4.3 Billion bushels of corn. The corn weighs about 242 billion pounds and contains the before mentioned 8.64 billion pounds of fat. According to the US EPA about 66% is extractable – or about 5.7 billion pounds of corn oil. If GreenShift COES make 70% penetration (EPA predicts someone will) then they could extract about about 3.9 billion pounds of fat/corn oil. (That’s well over half a billion gallons of Corn Oil!).

The Future
97 million head of cattle in the USA “contribute” about 140 TgCO2 equivalents (about 7 Million Tons) of methane through Enteric Fermentation. By taking out 3.9 billion pounds of fat from their diet – we will create a defatted, protein-enriched DDG diet that should yield less methane. The question is how many tons of methane? At only 2 dollars a ton in carbon offset price – and methane being at equivalent to 23 times carbon – what sort of carbon offset value have we created? Millions of tons could equal millions of dollars earned in carbon offsets. If we enter a world of “Cap and Trade” this may be yet another revenue stream for the corn oil extractor.
 
SkunK

Note that the units are Tg CO2 equivalent, (teragrams of CO2 equivalent) instead of million metric tonnes of carbon equivalent (MMTCE) reflecting the change in units used by the EPA to report U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon constitutes 12/44ths of carbon dioxide by weight. 

PS.  Note on the second page of this EPA article closely ties the digestablilty of cattle feed to the production of methane:  "From 1990 to 2008, emissions from enteric fermentation have increased by 6.4 percent. Generally, emissions decreased from 1996 to 2003, though with a slight increase in 2002. This trend was mainly due to decreasing populations of both beef and dairy cattle and increased digestibility of feed for feedlot cattle. Emissions increased  from 2004 through 2007, as both dairy and beef populations have undergone increases and the literature for dairy cow diets indicated a trend toward a decrease in feed digestibility for those years."